email: Substitute My Last Name Here @cis.uni-muenchen.de
tel.: +49 89 2180-9710
web: http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~fraser

Office: C110
Office hours: by appointment (please email)
Telephone hours: by appointment (please email)

Current position: I am a tenured professor with membership in both the Faculty of Languages and Literature (Fak 13) and the Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics (Fak 16, Zweitmitgliedschaft) at LMU Munich. Also PI of the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) and member of the ELLIS Unit Munich. Interested in the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning.

I was the coordinator for the Masters in Computational Linguistics at LMU Munich from 2014 to October 31st, 2023.
IMPORTANT:
Contact about our Masters program: studienberatung@cis.lmu.de, please write in German (it is a German-language program with a few classes taught in English)
Final complete application to Masters program: mscadmissions@cis.lmu.de
All other questions about the Masters including administrative requests (like credits or program change) MUST be addressed to msccoordination@cis.lmu.de

Recent Activities

• Frauke Kreuter and I have a new interdisciplinary project with the Bundesbank (German Central Bank) on using NLP for analyzing corpora sustainability reports with a focus on green indicators. We are hiring for a start very soon, see here.

• I've joined the ELLIS Munich Unit, see here. ELLIS is the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems.

• I am a senior area chair (for Machine Translation) at NAACL 2024 in Mexico City.

• Kathy has two papers in Findings of ACL which she will present in Toronto. The first one is on moral reasoning across languages in multilingual language models (with Jindrich and Darmstadt people in Kristan Kersting's lab), and the second one is on outlier dimensions in multilingual language models (with Alina and Jindrich). Lihong Liu, Alexandra and Hinrich have a paper at IWSLT on the copying problem in unsupervised NMT. Congratulations! See the publications page.

• I am a senior area chair (for Machine Translation) at EMNLP 2023 in Singapore.

• Sophie has a survey paper on unbalanced distributions at EACL with William Beluch and Annemarie Friedrich, while Alexandra has a Findings of EACL paper on domain adaptation with Matt Peters and Jesse Dodge, and a paper at the Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (at EACL), with Dario. Congratulations and have fun presenting!

• Viktor Hangya's DFG proposal on transfer learning for hate speech detection was accepted, congratulations! Viktor is hiring.

• I received an ERC Proof of Concept grant "Data for Multilingual Learning (DATA4ML)"! This will create a real world demonstrator for the work we did in my ERC Starting Grant on Domain Adaptation. The main focus here is on creating a tool to help minority language activists find and create multilingual data for training machine translation systems and language models for their languages, but our work will enable the creation of domain-specific models for companies as well. Here is the press release in English and German.

• I was interviewed by the Handesblatt newspaper about Facebook's open source AI strategy, which I strongly support. We have used Facebook models in many of our research projects, such as studies on cultural moral norms in LLMs and on transfer learning for cross-lingual hatespeech detection. Excerpts from the interview (in German).

• The journal version of our paper on cross-lingual transfer learning for hate speech detection has been published, congratulations Irina, Viktor and Iryna!

• My research group is offering MA and BA topics in WS 2022/2023, please read this page carefully

• Lavine and Alexandra have a paper in Findings of EMNLP on using adapters for multilingual multi-domain NMT. Viktor and Saadi have a paper at EMNLP on improving low resource languages in pretrained multilingual language models. Saadi, Viktor and Tobias Eder have a paper at the Multilingual Representation Workshop at EMNLP on comparison of cross-lingual contextual embeddings. Sophie also has a paper on some previous work on modals in Findings of EMNLP. Nice work everyone!

• I'll be one of the two senior area chairs for Multilinguality (with Ivan Vulic) at EACL 2023 (Dubrovnik/hybrid, this was only recently announced because it was previously planned for Kyiv). The deadline is soon, please submit your excellent research.

• Older activities here

Research

Publications and Research Interests

Curriculum Vitae

ERC Starting Grant (EU Horizon2020)

Health in my Language (HimL) (EU Horizon2020)

Models of Morphosyntax for Statistical Machine Translation (DFG Project (2 phases))

TTC - Terminology Extraction, Translation Tools and Comparable Corpora (EU FP7 Project)

Teaching - Current

Lecture on Information Extraction (Winter Semester 2023-2024)

Seminar on Information Extraction (Winter Semester 2023-2024)

WP 1 Lexicon, Syntax, Semantics: Large Language Models (Winter Semester 2023-2024)

Current Topics in NLP (Deep Learning and Neural Machine Translation) (Winter Semester 2023-2024, Fraser, Plank, Schütze)

Teaching - Past

click here

Bio

Biography

Post-docs

Dr. Viktor Hangya, 01/2017-, MCML, ERC

Dr. Marion Di Marco (nee Weller), 09/2019-, LMUExcellent, DFG Unsup

Dr. Jindřich Libovický, 09/2019-12/2021, ERC and DFG Unsup

Dr. Matthias Huck, 04/2016-03/2020, ERC and HimL

Dr. Fabienne Braune, 01/2016-12/2017, ERC and HimL (also Morphosyntax 2)

Dr. Aleš Tamchyna, 01/2017-04/2017. HimL and ERC (jointly supervised with Prof. Jan Hajic, Charles University Prague)

Dr. Tsuyoshi Okita, 01/2016-12/2016, ERC

Dr. Liane Guillou, 04/2016-09/2016, HimL

Ph.D. Students

Faeze Ghorbanpour (with Viktor Hangya). 09/2023-, DFG Transfer Learning for Hate Speech Detection; Hate Speech Detection, Transfer Learning

Irina Bigoulaeva (with Iryna Gurevych, TU Darmstadt). 10/2021-, TU Darmstadt funding; Transfer Learning and Hate Speech Detection

Katharina Hämmerl (with Jindrich Libovicky, now Charles U Prague). 07/2021-, MCML, DFG Unsup; Multilingual Representations

Prisca Piccirilli (with Sabine Schulte im Walde, U Stuttgart). 07/2021-, Studienstiftung Scholarship, Joint Stuttgart and LMU DFG funding; Metaphor Translation

Wen (Lavine) Lai. 04/2021-, LMU/CSC; Low Resource NMT, Domain Adaptation

Sophie Henning (with Annemarie Friedrich, Bosch) 01/2021-, Bosch; Calibration

Alexandra Chronopoulou 09/2019-, MCML, ERC, DFG Unsup; Multilingual Transfer Learning, Unsupervised MT

Dr. rer. nat. Dario Stojanovski 06/2017-06/2021, Modeling Contextual Information in Neural Machine Translation, ERC; Context-Aware NMT, Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised MT. First permanent position after graduation: Microsoft.

Dr. phil. Anita Ramm (nee Gojun), 05/2013-03/2018, Modeling the position and inflection of verbs in English to German machine translation. First position after graduation: BeOne Stuttgart GmbH.

Dr. phil. Marion Weller-Di Marco (nee Weller) (with Sabine Schulte im Walde), 12/2011-09/2017, Using Morpho-Syntactic and Semantic Information to Improve Statistical Machine Translation. First position after graduation: Post-doc at University of Amsterdam with Khalil Sima'an.

Dr. rer. nat. Fabienne Braune (with Andreas Maletti), 10/2009-11/2015, Decoding Strategies for Syntax-based Statistical Machine Translation. First position after graduation: Post-doc on deep learning and comparable corpora in my group.

Dr. phil. Fabienne Cap (nee Fritzinger), 10/2009-10/2014, Morphological Processing of Compounds for Statistical Machine Translation. First position after graduation: Post-doc at Uppsala with Joakim Nivre.

Dr. rer. nat. Nadir Durrani (with Helmut Schmid), 04/2008-11/2012, A Joint Translation Model With Integrated Reordering. First position after graduation: Post-doc with Philipp Koehn, U. Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.

Dr. rer. nat. Hassan Sajjad (with Helmut Schmid), 04/2008-10/2012, Statistical Models for Unsupervised, Semi-supervised and Supervised Transliteration Mining. First position after graduation: Research Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute. Currently: Associate Professor, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Visiting Ph.D. Students

Denis Peskov (University of Maryland College Park). 01/2020 to 10/2020

Simon Rieß (LMU Data Science). 10/2019 to 12/2019

Viktor Hangya (University of Szeged). 10/2016 to 12/2016

Ales Tamchyna (Charles University Prague). 10/2015 to 05/2016

Marija Brkic (University of Zagreb, Croatia). 09/2010 to 02/2011

Information for Students

Guidelines for students who are interested in visiting

Recommendation letters for students

Other Links

What I work on (for non-specialists)